Intel's 2007 Processors: Mist In The Morning Sun

After more than two months of speculation about Intel's 2007 processor offerings it seems that the mist is finally clearing. However, what is left behind is much less than was suggested. It is now clear that the speculation greatly overestimated what Intel would be capable of delivering.

Most of the talk about Intel's 2007 processor offerings grew out of two sources: the VR-Zone roadmaps and glowing reports about Intel's 45nm process. According to VR-Zone, Intel was to release the 45nm quad core Yorkfield chips in Q3 07 along with the 45nm dual core Wolfdale. As seen in the chart, Yorkfield would clock from 3.46ghz to as high as 3.73Ghz. Likewise, Wolfdale would clock from 3.5Ghz to as high as 4.0Ghz. Clock speeds that high would have surpassed anything AMD could have offered and given Intel a tremendous lead. Any scepticism about these clock numbers was quickly brushed aside as people waxed almost poetic about Intel's 45nm process. Supposedly it would have allowed huge increases in clock speed while also drawing less power. The typically stated cornerstone of Intel's 45nm process was high-K, or at least, this was the only item that Intel had that AMD did not. Adding to this, AMD's 65nm Brisbane chips were not readily available in the channel in Q4 06. When they did become available in the channel they were at lower clocks than the existing 90nm chips. So, the chatter immediately moved to talk about problems with AMD's 65nm process and even speculation that Barcelona wouldn't arrive until 2008. Not surprisingly, when Intel recently announced that it had actual working chips with high-K, the press reports were overflowing with praise. The second half of 2007 looked to many like it would be a landslide success for Intel with performance even further ahead of Barcelona than C2D was ahead of K8.

However, in the latest roadmaps, all of that is gone; Intel's amazing 45nm speed has completely vanished. The highest clocking Yorkfield is now only 2.4Ghz and Wolfdale tops out at 3.0Ghz. Worse still, even with these reduced speeds, 45nm has been pushed back to Q1 08. And, adding insult to injury, even Anandtech now agrees that AMD's Barcelona quad core will begin production in Q3 07 at 2.5Ghz. This makes sense for a lot of reaons however it seems that history and common sense are often casulties of processor enthusiasm. For example, when Core 2 Duo arrived, it probably seemed that Intel's Midas Touch had returned. The problem with this view however was that C2D's improvement was not unique. AMD had a similar increase in IPC with K8 and it now appears that Barcelona will have a similar increase in IPC over K8. SSE was the only area where C2D saw phenomenal increases in speed and this was done by doubling the width of all the necessary hardware. However, Barcelona's FP/SSE hardware will receive a similar stretch in width. If Barcelona is any slower than C2D at the same clock, it won't be by much. Rather than just being a simple upgrade, it has now been indicated that K8 was completely resurveyed and many improvements were made all over the architecture including branch speculation, out of order loading, stack operations, bus access scheduling, prefetch, and instruction decoding. Barcelona is therefore obviously a new core in the same way that K8 was. Presumably, Barcelona would then be the K9 or K10 core but AMD has not indicated this yet.

So, 2007 is now shaping up to be pretty much even in terms of performance between Intel and AMD. And, 2008 shouldn't be much different since IBM/AMD also have high-K and will use it on 45nm just as Intel will. The talk about what Intel would offer in 2007 looked like giants in the mist. And, now that the mist is clearing we can see that Intel's processors don't stand any taller than AMD's. It looks like we are going to have some very nice processors from both AMD and Intel in late 2007 and early 2008. It looks like both will have good Integer and SSE performance with very similar IPC and power consumption. This should be great for customers of both companies. Nevertheless, this still seems to be unacceptable to a lot of enthusiasts. Perhaps this is why the talk now seems to be about AMD's supposed poor finances and speculation about bankruptcy. I'm sorry but AMD is not going to go bankrupt while introducing a new architecture, new mobile chipset, and being able to compete better in the commercial segment with its desktop, integrated chipsets.

An interesting final note is how popular this blog is with Intel employees. For example, AMD employees are no more likely to read my blog than employees of Pratt & Whitney or General Electric. However, I get 20 times as much traffic from Intel employees. In fact, Intel employees are the single largest group of readers. I've seen this blog dismissed a number times as blatantly pro-AMD FUD by various people (such as the Tommies at ForumZ). However, I do have to wonder then, if this blog contains so little valid information, why readers from Intel keep coming back.